Turning Pages: Reviving the struggles and work of a forgotten poet

By Jane Sullivan

April 26, 2019 — 12.15pm

"She walks with the drunken wind for lover, this girl / This mad girl who can’t tell the thighs of shadows; From those of Dick and Tom and drunken Harry / As she goes walking with the wind along the meadows."

These are the first lines of a poem by a writer you have almost certainly never heard of. Elza de Locre is a forgotten minor figure of 1920s literary and artistic London and her life was one of mystery, oppression and fighting mental demons.

The English poet Elza de Locre, with her daughter.Credit:

So says Melbourne academic and writer John Arnold, who has spent years investigating her life and has published a book of her selected poetry. Some of her poems, he says, are very good, and her story deserves to be told.

The book, to be launched at the Clunes Booktown Festival on May 4, has the all too appropriate title How May I Endure. Arnold’s introduction is heartbreaking to read.

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Elza de Locre (one of many names she used) was born in England in 1897, the illegitimate child of her uncle, who had an affair with his wife’s younger sister – and things seemed to go downhill from there.

We’re introduced to Elza as seen through the male gaze: "A pale pre-Raphaelitish girl, with very fair hair parted in the centre … round china-blue eyes; and a pale rosebud mouth; her complexion being of such transparency that it was as if a soft candle glowed inside her skull, diffusing the veins with golden ichor rather than blood."

Australian writer Jack Lindsay, who lived with and published Elza de Locre.Credit:

That description is from Philip Lindsay, who met her in London in 1929 when she was partner to his brother Jack (they were sons of the Australian artist and writer Norman Lindsay).

Elza produced two books of poetry published by Jack’s company, Fanfrolico Press. They were largely neglected and did not sell well. The poems reveal much about her: many were direct transcriptions of dreams. Arnold says she saw herself as moving between life and death. "The poems … contain constant references and images to the earth, Elza’s relationship with nature, and reflections and statements on love and relationships and the challenges of being a female in a male-dominated world."

And what challenges they were. Elza came to Jack with a murky and painful past. As a child, she had probably been sexually abused by her grandfather. As a teenager, she ran away from home, was probably seduced by the proprietor of the hotel where she worked, drifted into London and survived in a variety of jobs. She married an actor, Robert Craig, when she was seven months pregnant, but they later separated and she struggled for money, sold herself on the streets, had an operation for gonorrhoea and attempted suicide.

It’s not clear how many of Elza’s stories about her tortured past were true. Nonetheless, Jack stuck by her and for a while they were happy. But he wrote about her: "She had some absolute integrity and pathos … and yet she had something absolutely broken, a submissive fear that attracted outrage and made her the casual prey of any passer-by."

For a while Jack and Elza looked after Robinetta, the child from her marriage, but then her husband’s side of the family took the girl back; Elza eventually lost a long custody suit and probably never saw her daughter again.

The 1930s was a period of mental decline: she became very possessive of Jack and sometimes violent. In 1941 she entered a mental care home, and she died in care in 1952. We can only hope that How May I Endure will revive the "mad girl’s" memory and her work.